Last week's top climate posts: September 19 - 25
A look at #CodeRedClimate’s footprint and BTS’ climate-focused visit to the UN
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Candace Owens, Townhall, and Joe Biden:
On Wednesday, musicians, actors, climate activists, and other prominent figures participated in a social media campaign - dubbed #CodeRedClimate - to raise support for climate action in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda ahead of Congressional Democrats’ high-wire act this week. The most impactful figures in the campaign on Facebook were the Foo Fighters, Hillary Clinton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Maroon 5, and Pearl Jam.
We estimate that the campaign’s influencers only generated around 44k interactions on Facebook last week - which is a surprisingly small impact for accounts with such large reach.
By comparison, the top performing political posts on Facebook each week receive around 300,000-500,000 interactions per post.
The campaign had slightly more engagement on Instagram, where the top 17 influencers for #CodeRedClimate generated at least 140k interactions - a still relatively small amount compared to many other political posts on that platform. There, the most impactful accounts were Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levine, Maroon 5, Amy Schumer, and Climate Reality. However, it appears that the social media campaign was least impactful on Twitter, where #CodeRedClimate tweets only got around 10k interactions; the most--retweeted post came from Kevin Bacon, but it only got 1.1k retweets.
At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza, Ben Shapiro, and their echo chamber mocked Biden’s address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, where he called the current climate crisis a “code red for humanity.” All told, we estimate that their Facebook posts criticizing the president received nearly 37k interactions.
Another indicator that #CodeRedClimate may not have been impactful on Facebook was how one single post from Turning Point USA - a video in which Candace Owens preaches climate skepticism at a TPUSA conference - got more interactions than the entire Code Red campaign, as did a post from Townhall trying to dunk on late-night hosts’ Climate Night.
While Facebook was rife with counterprogramming last week that may have outweighed posts from climate activists, some of the top tweets about climate change last week got hundreds of thousands of interactions thanks to the insanely popular K-Pop boy band BTS. Their climate-focused speech to the UNGA generated tons of earned media attention, and we found that tweets mentioning BTS and climate action last week got over 860k interactions, almost certainly facilitated by the band’s enormous and extremely active global fanbase on social media.
Here were the top three tweets mentioning climate or energy issues from the last week: